Leading With Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Over the last 10 years, Red Hat has brought the software industry forward with the innovative technology delivered through our Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. With this platform, we offered a new definition of customer value for the entire industry – reduced costs, increased performance, eliminated vendor lock-in and much more:

We pioneered commercial-grade open source solutions to enable a much wider range of computing at more affordable prices and computing power that extends to enterprises around the world.

We built a huge ecosystem of thousands of partners and certified platforms that offer our customers choice and flexibility.

We delivered innovation through our unique subscription model that allows us to balance our commitment to customers and partners to provide a solid, enterprise-class platform while maintaining certification stability.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we continue to provide an industry-leading application platform, all based on open source technology, designed with the goal that end customers are and should continue to be the largest benefactors of Red Hat and our product offerings.

In addition, our unique open source model allows us to “partner with the world.” The world includes our developer community that has helped to create world-class products, our partners and end customers that include corporations, governments and educational institutions around the world. We believe that the visibility (or transparency) of our code and spirit of community participation is an incredibly powerful operating model.

Of course, with this unique open source operating model and leadership position comes competitors, challenging us and wanting to draw from our success. In response, we believe that our unique value and truly open position continues to be the sound choice for enterprise customers who seek lasting value in their IT investments – especially when compared to competitors who selectively open their offerings while seeking to lock in their customers.

Our commitment to customers, partners and the open source development community is to maintain our focus on innovation, security, reliability and performance.

Continuous Innovation
One of the main features of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription model is that it enables innovation to be delivered to our customers on an on-going basis. Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers receive technology updates and upgrades every six months on average. By backporting upstream code into the product code base, coupled with rigorous testing and QA, customers can benefit from industry innovation without losing compatibility and stability. With each release, we document the new features and updates at our customer portal here.

Secure and Reliable
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a well-deserved reputation for being a secure and reliable operating platform. Fixes for security issues or critical bugs are provided as soon as they are available – to date more than 98 percent of all critical security fixes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 have been delivered within one calendar day of them being public.

Red Hat’s engineering process ensures stability and compatibility for the whole platform with every change, and is verified by extensive testing internally and with partners. All issues reported by customers and partners are carefully prioritized, in an effort to provide the highest degree of customer and partner satisfaction.

High Performance
Red Hat’s goal is to have Red Hat Enterprise Linux deliver leading “out of the box” performance for multiple workloads and servers, not just one or two configurations. Red Hat works with its partners to offer customers more choice when it comes to hardware platforms and applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is the highest performing version ever, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is on track for delivery later this year, is designed to be the highest performing product on the market – bar none.

A complete platform
Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers a powerful solution that is suitable for a broad spectrum of IT infrastructures. It combines industry-leading reliability, scalability, performance and security with a comprehensive ecosystem of certified hardware systems and applications. It is created with our customers and partners, for our customers and partners. Our commitment is deep and lasting, not fireworks and hyperbole followed by a huge invoice and vendor lock-in.